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D&D 5E Modifying the light crossbow to be a gunslingers pistol.

Saeviomagy

Adventurer
Why not check out Matt Mercer's Gunslinger? It's the best one I've seen, and I have seen hours of it in play.

My read of it has always been that the end result is incredibly similar to the battlemaster, but with some added balance issues.

The only real addition needed to the rules are guns which are balanced around having a failure rate. Giving a gun a % chance to jam and waste the rest of an attack action (and potentially need to be repaired as well) should be sufficient: you just need to work out how much damage that will waste on average.

Note that for the purposes of realism and avoiding abuse, I'm NOT going to use the attack roll to trigger the failure: you end up with odd things like "shooting in the dark makes guns more likely to fail" and "shooting when you have surprise makes guns less likely to fail". I also don't want to add an extra roll: so I'll focus on checking the damage roll to check for misfires. Personally I already roll damage at the same time as attacks, so this isn't an extra roll at my table.

We can leave hit chance out of the equation, because it's applied to both lost and gained damage.

So that leaves us with math:

if p is the jam probability (independant of a successful hit) and n is the number of attacks you can make, while d is the damage you deal and b is the bonus damage for being a gun, then we need to solve

n
sigma (d+b)(1-p)^x = nd
x=0

Interestingly enough, if we set p at 0.1, b = 2.5 more or less works for 2 or 3 attacks.

Which suggests that you can have a one-handed weapon that uses a d10, which fails to hit, uses up the rest of your attacks for the round and needs repair when you roll a 1 for damage, and it's roughly comparable to having an extra point of damage per round on a hand crossbow for 2 or 3 attack characters (or 0.5-0.3 damage per successful attack). I think that's reasonable given the extra expenses incurred.

For single attacks it pulls ahead (but at low levels you can make it prohibitive to carry spares, which increases the impact of a failure).

If you want to try two-handed weapons, then you can get something similar moving from a heavy crossbow at 1d10 to a gun that rolls 2d6 for damage and fails on a damage roll of 2 or 3. I think this one actually loses out if you have 3 attacks, which is a bummer. Taking it down to only failing on a 2 is a significant damage boost (2-4 points per round), but I suppose if you were to tack something like a minor action reload after 2 shots, that might be workable, but obviously good for certain characters and poor for ones that like their minor actions.

Note that any of these will be a minor power increase for characters at high level that only have a single attack, but it's on the order of a +1 to damage.

tl:dr version:

A one-handed martial weapon with range 30/120 that deals 1d10 damage, but deals 0 damage, wastes the rest of your attacks for the round and breaks when you roll a 1 on the damage die is more-or-less balanced.

A two-handed martial weapon with a range of 100/400 that deals 2d6 damage, but deals 0 damage, wastes the rest of your attacks for the round and breaks when you roll a 2 or 3 for damage is more or less balanced.
 
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Satyrn

First Post
Couldn't the character just carry multiple guns?

Yeah. And should since any gun he carries is going to misfire one in 20 shots.

And I just think it feels right that a malfunctoning gun should take more than a couple seconds in the middle of combat to fix. Cleaning a gun seems to me to get the flavour right, and that seems to me to fit in a rest.

And I might go even further and say that cleaning and repairing gun is actually strenuous enough that doing so prevents a character from gaining the benefits of a short rest.
 

Rocksome

Explorer
I like the idea, but I think the penalties are too severe for a one-step die increase. Increasing the damage from d6 to d8 is an average damage increase of +1. Over 20 hits, that's + 20 damage. If you assume a 50/50 hit rate that's about +10 damage per 20 shots. Then consider that a misfire results in a missed attack, that's the potential for 1d8+X damage that is lost, which is half of that on average if you assume a 50/50 hit rate. That's somewhere in to order of 5 damage lost per 20 shots.

At this point the die increase is more beneficial to the gun that the risk of a misfire, but not by much. If you then take Sharpshooter into account, you're distinctly better of going with a hand crossbow and not risking a misfire and potentially losing 1d8+10+X damage.

I wouldn't want to nerf the gun any more than that, though for simulationist purposes we could increase the damage to d10 and then talk about more serious misfire penalties. That does however seem a little extreme and not so "fun", and the bigger the damage die gets and the bigger the misfire penalty, the more it pushes towards the multiple guns option to circumvent the penalties.
 

The thing with making a gun jam on 1 is that it makes Halflings the best Gunslinger in 5e because of their ability to reroll 1s.

I actually like the flavor of that. I can see why some may not though.
 

Kalshane

First Post
Honestly, I've always felt like Matt Mercer's Gunslinger is too punishing. The class abilities really don't exceed those of a battlemaster with a handcrossbow and the only reason Percy does as well as he does is because Taliesin tends to roll above average and (along the same lines) he rolled ridiculously well for Percy's stats.

I also agree that tying it to the attack roll does wonky things with Advantage/Disadvantage.
 

Saeviomagy

Adventurer
I like the idea, but I think the penalties are too severe for a one-step die increase. Increasing the damage from d6 to d8 is an average damage increase of +1. Over 20 hits, that's + 20 damage. If you assume a 50/50 hit rate that's about +10 damage per 20 shots. Then consider that a misfire results in a missed attack, that's the potential for 1d8+X damage that is lost, which is half of that on average if you assume a 50/50 hit rate. That's somewhere in to order of 5 damage lost per 20 shots.
Take a look at my numbers: I already included all this.
At this point the die increase is more beneficial to the gun that the risk of a misfire, but not by much. If you then take Sharpshooter into account, you're distinctly better of going with a hand crossbow and not risking a misfire and potentially losing 1d8+10+X damage.
This is a good point. If you wanted, then the solution is to either up the damage bonus of sharpshooter when used with a gun, or just create an alternative gun-only feat that has similar benefits to sharpshooter, but compensating for the miss chance. FWIW, the extra damage needed is only +2 when sharpshooting for the pistol I described in my post.
I wouldn't want to nerf the gun any more than that, though for simulationist purposes we could increase the damage to d10 and then talk about more serious misfire penalties. That does however seem a little extreme and not so "fun", and the bigger the damage die gets and the bigger the misfire penalty, the more it pushes towards the multiple guns option to circumvent the penalties.
Like I said above: if you make the misfire rely on rolling a 1 on the damage die, have the gun failure remove the rest of your attacks for the round and require no gun repair at all, then you end up with something that's slightly too good for characters with a single attack, but balanced for 2 or 3 attacks. Additionally, carrying multiple guns does not help you.

I would add a gun repair procedure just for a little realism, but not expect it to be done during combat. In essence: carry backup weapons, be those extra guns or just a sword. If guns are expensive, carrying extra ones might not be feasible at low level, but become more obtainable as the game progresses (which somewhat mitigates the "guns are best if you only have one attack" issue of my scheme).

I also agree with Kalshane: Percy would be performing substantially better were he a straightforward battlemaster using a bow. Which is a bit of a shame.
 

ScaleyBob

Explorer
I've had a PC Ranger in my current game using a modified Derro Repeater X-Bow which has much the same stats as I use for Handguns in my Wild West themed game - d8 damage, one handed, Ammunition 6, which can be used as a Hand Crossbow for the Crossbow Expert feat. It's quite nasty, but the having to use an Action or Bonus Action to reload after 6 shots has proven to be a real limiting factor, even without any sort of misfire rule.When he can shoot 3 times in a round (and that's before Multiattack at 5th level), it doesn't take long to chew through the ammo in the clip and giving up either type of action to reload soon proved to be a real pain.

He's now using a normal Hand Crossbow so he no longer has to reload.
 
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